Writing in the Margins
Before I was anything else, I was a writer.
Well, okay… If I'm honest, I was a fairy princess before anything else.
But “fairy princess” is an identity, and “writer” is both an identity and a vocation. So, a writer. Before I was a book seller, before I was a dog trainer, before I was a queer community organizer or a workshop facilitator, I was a writer. Fiction and poetry and an “online journal”* before the term blog had been coined.
And yet, desite this, I've never published my creative writing anywhere but my own websites. I've never submitted my creative work to anyone other than a teacher or professor. For some writers, publication is never the goal and the personal, private act of writing is just as valuable and worthy as writing for publication. This isn't why I have never submitted my work, though. For me, it wasn't an intentional, purposeful act of working in solitude. For me, it was fear. Pure, poisonous fear.
I've held this identity close and secret, kept it in the shadows of my other work, internalizing the idea that “those who can't do, teach” and hoping that I can help others do what I've always been too afraid to do for myself. And even though I truly believe in the principles that guide Writing in the Margins, in the idea that writing can be transformative and liberatory, that every person has a unique creative voice and that each of those voices have value… even though these are the ideas that guide my activism around encouraging expression and exploration on the page… I have never trusted that anyone else would value my unique creative voice. I have seen myself as a cheerleader for other writers, because I was too afraid to be a cheerleader for my own writing.
But this week I attended the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference at UBC in Vancouver, and surrounded by writers and teachers of writing, I felt at home. I felt like I had something of value to offer, and infinite lessons to learn. And I thought, not for the first time but perhaps for the first time in such a context, “Yes, I am a writer. I am right about myself. I am right about the value of each voice, and I do have a voice, and it does have value.”
I attended six events at the conference.
The first was “What's the Matter? Thinking, Writing, and Teaching through Things” with Christine Wiesenthal, Aislinn Hunter, Suzette Mayr and Betsy Warland. I found this panel incredibly helpful, and came away with my mind buzzing with ideas for future workshops (museum trips with writing groups, Thing-based writing prompts, lists-as-world-building, post-colonial hauntings, etc.).
I found Christine Weisenthal's paper fascinating as she gave us a case study of an elephant head in a museum at the University of Alberta – a Thing that has been distanced from its context, and offers multiple points of entry into writing about time, distance, perception of events, violence, human species-supremacist behaviour, circuses, museums, bones.
Aislinn Hunter's paper was gorgeous. Her reading was smooth and engaging and her argument for the craft of lists was really thought-provoking. I'm still trying to figure out how to incorporate lists and list-poetry into my own writing and writing workshops, but she provided some undeniably beautiful and evocative lists. Her paper was an example of showing, not telling, and it worked well.
Suzette Mayr, who taught the Fiction II class I attended a couple years ago, spoke about hauntings. She was one of the few people who engaged significantly with the necessity of engaging with colonial history when writing as a Canadian writer writing a story set in Canada. She drew comparisons to Australian colonial history, and although I'm still thinking about what she said regarding our ongoing colonial context and how it must, or should, inevitably echo in our stories, I'm really glad she brought it up. She used the term Settler Invader, and I thought that was a very powerful reminder of the violence in our history (and present).
I also attended “Adaptation as Metamorphosis: Because One Life Just Isn't Enough” with Priscila Uppal (SO AMAZING), Maureen Medved, and Daniel Scott Tysdal; “All in the Family: Writing the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Aspects of Family in Novels and Memoir” with Priscila Uppal, David Chariandy, and Joseph Kertes; “Teaching Writing for Media” with Michael V. Smith, Aaron Goodman and Nicola Harwood; the Student Caucus meeting; and the Friday night Literary Cabaret with Kevin McPherson Ekhoff, Jake Kennedy, Jordan Abel, Christian Bok, Amber Dawn and Jillian Christmas.
Jillian Christmas' performance blew me away. Her last poem called out the anti-blackness and racism in a lot of white feminism and it was perfect. Listening to her, I felt inspired and encouraged, and I felt like I was actually witnessing the radical potential of anti-oppressive writing to be world-changing activism. It was fantastic.
One thing that I noticed about the conference, which was brought up by multiple people in the student caucus meeting, was the lack of panels focusing specifically on diversity or the experiences of marginalized writers. As one attendee said to me, it felt like a bit of an “old boys' club,” and that's a problem. Although there was diversity in the panels, there wasn't much in terms of actively acknowledging how diverse identities and intersections of marginalization can impact the experience of writing and being a writer.
I would love to see that change at the next conference, in 2016, and since I'm on the board now, I think I'll be able to push for it.
And I suppose that means I can embrace this identity, take a few risks, and finally get around to submitting my work. Cross your fingers for me, fellow writers! And let me know if you are also working towards submitting work for publication – maybe we can encourage each other.
* Oh yes, yes indeed. You can still find it, full of all its angst and teenage drama, if you know where to look.
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